Not so long ago, the job of product manager was about assessing market data, creating requirements, and managing the hand-off to sales/marketing. Maybe you’d talk to a customer somewhere in there and they’d tell you what features they wanted. But companies that manage product that way are dying.
Being a product person today is a new game, and product managers are at the center of it. Today, particularly if your product is mostly digital, you might update it several times a day. Massive troves of data are available for making decisions and, at the same time, deep insights into customer motivation and experience are more important than ever. The job of the modern product manager is to charter a direction and create a successful working environment for all the actors involved in product success. It’s not a simple job or an easy job, but it is a meaningful job where you’ll be learning all the time.
This course will help you along your learning journey and prepare you with the skills and perspective you need to:
Create the actionable focus to successfully manage your product (week 1)
Focus your work using modern product management methods (week 2)
Manage new products and explore new product ideas (week 3)
Manage and amplify existing products (week 4)
This course is ideal for current product or general managers interested in today's modern product management methods.
This course was developed with the generous support of the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

NK

This course covers all the necessary and much required fundamentals about the product management. The course structure is very well balanced and covers all the aspects of product management. Thanks

JW

May 23, 2019

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

I'm totally a Newbie about Digital Product Management. I learn a lot of New Things. I hope this Certificate will advance my career. Thank you Professor Alex Cowan for teaching me a lot of things.

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Achieving Focus and #Winning

As a product manager, you and your team will always have more ideas and more requests than you can possibly manage. Making matters still more complicated, part of your job is to develop and then ‘sell’ a particular view of what should happen with your product to diverse stakeholders (engineering, marketing, etc.). How do you do it? Success requires an actionable, testable focus. The successful product manager identifies vivid, testable customer outcomes and creates focus around them. This week we’ll show you how to interface effectively with all your stakeholders to create that actionable focus.

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Alex Cowan

Faculty & Batten Fellow

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When we talk about something as broad as how to be a really great product manager, it's easy to get lost in platitudes and generalities that aren't going to be very actionable for you as a product manager. In the videos and in the resources that you'll find in the course here, I've used specific examples and even some templates in some cases to really help you anchor into the practice of these specific techniques and concepts that we're going through. To that end, I have a fictional company that I'm going to use in a number of the videos called Enable Quiz. Let's take a look at the positioning statement. Their basic idea is that for hiring managers, they are going to provide this lightweight quizzing solution to assess the skills of candidates that come in and interview for engineering jobs that they have. And it isn't something that is going to give people formal certifications or even be relevant once they get hired. But it's just a very lightweight means to make quick initial assessments on where they are for a given skill set. Let's take a look at the storyboard. Our major actors here are Helen, the HR Manager, who is in charge of getting candidates in and doing some initial screening, Frank or Francine, the Functional Manager, who is the actual, let's say, development lead or a development manager. And the way they interact is that when Frank or Francine needs to hire somebody, they give a job description to Helen or Hank, and in regarding Enable Quiz, he or she then takes this and makes a little quiz with and quiz may have several topics. So for instance, let's say they're hiring a full stack web developer. They might want a quiz for, let's say, they use Ruby, JavaScript and maybe even some stuff within Ext JS, JavaScript framework, and this may be what's on the quiz. And they give this to Ross the Recruit who is coming in to interview and the outcome that they want to see for their customer is that they're getting better hiring outcomes. That's probably the most important thing we hypothesize at this company, and before that, that they're able to do this efficiently and spend less time in the recruiting process. If we look at the specific problem area that they're approaching, what problem are they trying to solve, what job are they doing for the customer? It's that these firms typically are needing to hire a lot of technical talent, and they don't have a systematic way to assess the skill levels of the candidates across these different applications or different technologies that they may need to use in their job. And that may be important for people that are coming in that are not yet employees that are interviewing. And they may find that there is a different modality that it's useful also inside the company if they're going to set up some skills development programs, maybe they want to kind of baseline where different people are so they can just put more relevant programs in front of them that are more relevant to where they want to go with their career. And the alternatives that these customers use, we think, are just checking references and maybe having to ask a few kind of annoying probing technical questions during the interviews. And we hypothesize that they'd like to do less of that and just talk to the candidates. And then if they had a sort of systematic way to assess the candidates that they would like that. They would like to get this basic skills assessment out of the way. So that is some information about what this company is, what their core hypotheses are about what they're going to do that's valuable. And I just think this will be helpful context for you as we apply some of these methods to Enable Quiz and see how they might approach them.